The Ever Auspicious Fish Maw Soup

The smell of fish maw in the kitchen was very strong as I was boiling this ingredient in preparation of making this soup the night before. It smells like Chinese New Year; smells like how the kitchen and the entire house always smells like when my mum prepares the dishes before the reunion dinner. It smells very familiar, and very good.

My grandmother and my mother used to cook fish maw soup in a very traditional Teochew way, in that they would first prepare the soup with pork ribs, and then when cooking the fish maw soup itself, add in a ton of other ingredients including cabbage leaves, mushrooms, scallops etc to make for a filled pot of treasure. It’s really nice because the soup got to absorb all the different flavours of the ingredients in the soup and naturally, the longer they remained in the soup, the more flavoursome they became. I used to love waiting till the soup is almost gone to drink up the remaining spoonfuls of it, together with whatever remained at the bottom of the pot.

For my fish maw soup recipe this time, I thought of trying out the more typical version that we frequently get served during wedding dinners and in restaurants, instead of what my parents and grandparents did. It’s very simple to prepare, which makes it very easy to serve up with rice over a weekday dinner. Make sure to get fish maw that is of a better quality because this would definitely affect the texture and quality of a simple soup like this one.

Ingredients:

Dried fish maw: 50g

Chicken stock: 1 liter

Dried scallop: a handful

Crab meat: 200g, flaked

Shiitake mushroom: 100g, sliced thinly

Egg white: 2

Salt: to taste

Fish sauce: to taste

Starch mixture: 2 tbsp potato starch + 100ml water

Black vinegar: to serve

Ground white pepper: to serve

Parsley: finely chopped as garnish

Method:

Boil fish maw for 15 min. Drain and leave to cool before slicing into strips.

Bring chicken stock to a boil. I added the stock that was used to boil the fish maw to make this stock.